[havernator]

I want to like ZFS, and am using it, but however good it is at not losing data while in operation, the UI feels like it’s designed to make you wreck your data. I guess I just need more practice, but not being able to just rip a drive out and mount it on another machine in a pinch makes me damn nervous. Something about how it’s managed makes the whole file system feel ephemeral, just one bad-but-not-obviously-so command away from being destroyed, and I’m nowhere near being comfortable with that yet (and don’t really see a path to getting to comfort)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> but not being able to just rip a drive out and mount it on another machine in a pinch makes me damn nervous

Why can't you? Granted, you need enough disks to actually have all the data - so ex. if you did RAID0 then yes you need all disks, but say if you did a mirror you can totally just yank a disk out, attach it to another machine, and `zpool import` it.

[havernator]

Can you? I was under the impression that without an “export” beforehand, you can’t.

[throw0101a]

See the "split" command with OpenZFS 0.8.0+:

* https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/ZFSSplitPoolE...

Only with mirrored drives.

Any RAID-Z level would need a full export/import as data is striped, but hot-swap drives can be pulled once things are unmount.

[magicalhippo]

I recently did just this. I had to use the -f flag but it imported just fine on a different computer.

I agree that it can be a bit daunting to operate, there are a few footguns around that, while it might not lead to data loss, but can lead to unfortunate situations.

Just the other day someone on the mailing list had managed to add a single drive as a new top-level vdev to a petabyte pool, rather than adding it as a new spare drive, simply by omitting the word "spare" from the "zpool add" command...

That said, I've been using ZFS at home here with 6+ disks for almost a decade now, and I've never lost data despite lots of various incidents, including lots of power losses and various hardware failures (like disks, mobo and PSU). So overall I'm very happy with it.

[havernator]

I guess it just seems like there’s a lot more state than with file systems I’m used to dealing with. In fact, since journaling became normal, most just have two states (from the user’s perspective) whether powered on or off, mounted or unmounted, whatever—broken, or OK.

ZFS has... a lot more. It’s just very different and the way these states fit together, and worrying about how to operate on them safely, makes me more nervous, in many ways, than less-safe file systems do. I’m sure that will pass, but it’s still not fun.

[magicalhippo]

Yeah since it replaces "the whole stack" it's daunting and a lot of terms to, well, come to terms with.

For me I found it beneficial to watch the videos on how ZFS is built up, like this one[1]. Helped putting the pieces together.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsY-BafQgj4

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Oh no that'd be a terrible design:) AFAIK the most difficulty is that you might have to use `zpool import -f` to force it to ignore the pool not having been cleanly exported.

EDIT: It'd look like this: https://serverfault.com/questions/964075/how-can-i-recover-m...